Avoiding Sexism in Legal Writing—Man-Ending Nouns and Salutations

Last week, I tackled the pronoun problem in legal writing and explained how legal writers can avoid using masculine-singular-personal pronouns—words that can distract some readers and diminish your credibility as a legal writer.

This week, I discuss non-sexist solutions to troublesome man-ending nouns, and how to make sure that you’re using non-sexist salutations in letters.

Substitute Sex-Neutral Words for Man-Ending Nouns

Man-ending nouns abound in the English language. We have, for example, common words like policeman, congressman, and businessman; but there are innumerable more.

19th- and early-20th-Century judicial opinions are also littered with man-ending nouns, which cemented the acceptability of some of these words as legal terms of art into the minds of impressionable law students.

The style manual (p. 71) of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court lists some of these substitutes for man-ending nouns, adds a few more, and also addresses the masculine-singular-personal-pronoun problem.

Avoid Person-Ending Neologisms

Using the sex-neutral substitutes above is the preferred way to avoid using man-ending nouns. What’s not preferred—and what will jar readers—is substituting person-ending nouns for man-ending nouns. Person-ending nouns are neologisms—which is a fancy term for made-up words.

Take their advice: Leave neologisms like personpower to writers who don’t care about being guardians of the English language.

Avoid Sexist Salutations

Even addressing a business letter can give rise to charges of latent sexism.

As R.W Burchfield notes in The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage (3d ed. 1996), in the 1970s feminists in the United States started promoting the use of Ms. in business correspondence where the marital status of the woman to whom the letter was addressed was unknown.

Today, as Bryan Garner notes in Garner’s Modern American Usage, distinguishing in salutations between a married woman, on the one hand, and a single woman, on the other, should be avoided:

Differentiating between one woman and another on the basis of her marital status is invidious, really, if we do not make the same distinction for men. . . . Though many people once considered Ms. an abomination, today it is accepted as the standard way of addressing a married or unmarried woman. Unless the writer knows that a woman prefers to use Mrs. or Miss, the surest course today is to use Ms.

Although Garner’s bright-line rule of substituting Ms. for Mrs. is safe to follow, Eric Patridge might have a slightly better alternative: “One should . . . try to ascertain the woman’s preference and use Ms with caution, particularly in correspondence with older women who grew up before this locution [Ms.] was heard of.”

Be Conscious of Sexism in Legal Writing

Regardless of whether you believe that the criticism of sexism in legal writing is unwarranted or overblown, your credibility as a legal writer depends on spotting these problem areas.

There are many obstacles to good legal writing. Don’t let inadvertent sexism be another one.

Matthew R. Salzwedel is a former lead managing editor of the Minnesota Law Review.
After law school, he clerked for the Minnesota Court of Appeals and practiced commercial and antitrust litigation in Minneapolis and Philadelphia. He now is corporate counsel at a Minneapolis-based company.

Are you kidding me? Have the language police now developed the power to determine the plain meaning of nouns and pronouns? I refer the reader to several opinions by (female, non-male, the better sex) writers:
“The word “sex” — clearly evocative of an unequivocal demarcation between men and women — has been replaced by the pale and neutral “gender,” and the words “man” and “he” — now avoided as if they were worse than obscenities — have been replaced by the neuter “person” and by grammatically confusing, cumbersome, or offensive variants of “he/she” or “she” alone as the pronoun of general reference.
Since it was never even remotely in doubt that when used as a general referent, the male pronoun included females, this change was never designed to prevent confusion. The change has, on the contrary, often created confusion. Its purpose is solely ideological.”
F. Carolyn Graglia, Domestic Tranquility, A Brief Against Feminism, Spence Publishing Company, Dallas, 1998, p.154
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“I, for one, want to be free to refer to “the brotherhood of man” without being corrected by the language police. I want to decide for myself whether I should be called a chairman, a chairwoman, or a chairperson (I am not a chair). I want to see My Fair Lady and laugh when Professor Higgins sings, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” As a writer, I want to know that I am free to use the words and images of my choosing.”
Diane Ravitch, The Language Police, Alfred A. Knopf, 2003, p.169
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“Pages [the Apple word processing program] just hates gender specific expressions and is constantly on guard for them. In a column titled “Assad’s Useful Idiots” I had written that Vogue magazine “apparently immune to shame, ran a fawning profile of the dictator’s wife.” Proofreadress was on it. “Gender specific expression. A gender neutral word such as ‘spouse’ may be appropriate.” Really Proofreadress? Spouse is a legal word, good for real estate transactions and rhyming with house in Les Miserables’ “Master of the House.” But as a substitute for wife, it’s ungainly and odd. Wife is a perfectly good word — in fact, it’s a perfectly good status, one that I’m glad to enjoy.”
Mona Charen, “Gender specific writer, my ‘proofreadress’,” March 9, 2012
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